Commentary on Piaget:

Piaget, a psychologist famous in the field of cognitive development, talks about the origins of cognitive development, contrasted with the more-popular Vygotsky: Piaget says that cognitive development in a social setting is best when one is surrounded by peers rather than older children. Speaking from a pro-autonomous point of view, he claims that being surrounded by older children leads to an influence of their own issues with control (or other problems) and are acted out in turn on these younger children.

Speaking on the act of play, the kinds of behaviors we see exhibited in children (dress-up, house, some occupational roleplay) can clearly be traced back to the schemata that they themselves have experienced - a child will pretend to be a teacher and line her dolls up in a row and berate them only if she in turn has experienced the beration of her teacher (or else it would not register in her mind, as there is no connective-bridge she can make between that 'action' and any subjective experience.) It therefore becomes a manner of experience - obviously schemata such as 'control' and 'autonomy' cannot come about if a child has experienced nothing suggested by colloquialism to be 'control' or 'autonomy' - she simply has a loosely abstract association of what promotes and what hinders what she wants to be doing. It is these symbols, such as society's terminology of control and autonomy, or her parents/peers pointed actions (namely, purposefully acting out a control situation to exorcise their own interpretation, thus solidifying it.)

Now getting back to what I was saying about the origins of cognitive development, Piaget claims that the best situation for a child to develop in is in the company of peers - people who have not had experience to schemata that they will in turn act out on our protagonist - and this is contrasted with Vygotsky's belief that a child will learn themes best from a slightly older child who is providing the same schemata (which he believes is unavoidable, I assume) from a slightly more advanced/developed learning point (termed the 'zone of proximal development'.) Let's run with Piaget's model for a minute:

Learning from peers because older children will pass on their own interpretations/fixations is in the same vein as arguing that a child should be the one developing these schemata from his own point of view (pointless, but I continue). Peers represent people who have had similar experiences/upbrings: namely, they know nothing our protagonist doesn't know, and they exist merely to 'bounce ideas off of' - static characters that are more an object or extension of one's environment than subjects. Essentially, multiple copies of the protagonist. We can then say that Piaget is promoting an object-centered developmental theory, as opposed to the dynamic unpredictable current of Vygotsky. While it is impossible to develop cognition completely removed from aliens (xeno...foreign peoples), as that would require no exposure to the confined syntactualism of language, I still maintain Piaget provides a more poignant approach. Namely, because he promotes object-centrism, it therefore becomes possible to *categorize* all facets of the perceived world (especially people), leading to a formative, scientific understanding of one's environment; if one was to use Vygotsky's approach to the extreme, all understanding would be rendered subjective, as well as leading to a person being nothing more than another vehicle for society to run through. Perhaps this is why autists are not favored in societal selection. My concluding point is that an object centered view, while it may be impossible to attain in its fullest, represents the dearth of cognitive development: that in order to have a cognition, or an understanding of the world, one must - to some degree - classify, classify, classify everything by some sorting schemata.

I think this dichotomy should also be used or kept in mind when looking at autism: that a completely Piaget-ian approach to cognition would result in something that falls under the autistic spectrum. But I digress; dinner is ready, and its time to digest.